Avoiding FAANG's Poison | Chaos Lever

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Ned: Sleeping on the floor when you're a teenager? No problem. In your 20s? Yeah, you might wake up with a back ache. In your 40s, Chris? Everything hurts.

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Chris: Even things you don't have.

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Ned: Yeah. I feel like I borrowed extra hips from someone else just so they could hurt.

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Chris: The last time I had to sleep on the floor, I woke up with ovary pain.

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Ned: Hello, alleged human, and welcome to the Chaos Lever podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot. I'm a real human person who, well, I might not have ovaries, but I guess I can borrow some from Chris if I need them, who, speaking of which, is also here. Hi, Chris.

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Chris: And no, you absolutely cannot. Frankly, I'm upset that you made that assumption.

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Ned: Well, you know what they say when you make an assumption, it makes Nass out of you.

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Chris: Wait a minute.

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Ned: And umption, of course. Umption, yes. We'll get there. My youngest got stricken with a stomach flu for 24 hours. Yes. Which is like, it's so... What's the word I'm looking for? It puts you a state where you want to comfort them, but you also want to stay as far away from them as possible.

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Chris: I get it. I don't know if I've ever... I don't know if I've ever told this story on the podcast before, but I used to get sick all the time. I mean, I still do, actually, but we're talking monthly. Okay. Stomac flues like that, regular occurrence. And at one point when I was a kid, I had a rough one. And I think it made me a little loopy because at a certain point, I had to go to the bathroom and evacuate. And then 90 minutes later, I had to do it again, but I used the bathroom on the other floor Okay. Because I don't know, I didn't want to throw up in the same toilet twice.

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Ned: You're spreading love.

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Chris: And I remember, the thing is I had to run all the way downstairs, all the way through the living room to make it to the bathroom. And when I finished my attentions, I came out and my mother just looked at me. I'm 12, and she looked at me and she's like, What is wrong with you? The first of many times that question has been asked.

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Ned: That's the reason it's the title of your third memoir.

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Chris: Then as now, I have no good answer.

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Ned: I will say that she got a little loopy at one point from sleep deprivation and not having enough fluids in her. I can see that. You're out of it. You don't know what's going on.

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Chris: Plus the downstairs, that was the better bathroom. We all know it. It's time we stopped living a lie.

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Ned: There is a preferred bathroom by everyone in my household, and it's the downstairs bathroom, and I don't know why. Yeah, there's over it. I'm like, There are three bathrooms.

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Chris: You have two other options. There's no reason for Discord. Find another one.

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Ned: Oh, no. Sometimes they'll wait. I'm like, Whatever. Anyhow, let's talk about in something that's not Bathrooms, but it's definitely full of shit.

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Chris: Nicely done.

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Ned: Thank you.

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Chris: I wanted to talk about, and I worked on this headline for a while. This is not the best that I could come up with, but it is what I came up with until I ran out of time.

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Ned: It's a good one. I like it.

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Chris: We want to talk about living life without being poisoned by fang.

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Ned: For people who are listening, which is everybody, when you say fang, can you spell that?

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Chris: I just want to pause and I want to circle back to you asking on a podcast about the people who are listening.

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Ned: Yes.

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Chris: I want to ask a sub-question, who the F Ls would you be talking to?

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Ned: Your ovaries.

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Chris: This is going to go great.

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Ned: You brought it up. It's your own damn fault.

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Chris: The acronym FANG is actually F-A-A-N-G. It was coined not to describe technology companies per se, but as a model for you looking at companies to invest in. The fact that they were technology based was just coincidental.

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Ned: Oh.

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Chris: This happened in 2013, and allegedly it was done by Jim Kramer, which upsets me because I don't want to give him credit for anything ever.

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Ned: Except for being wrong.

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Chris: So I'm not going to. I'm going to assume that Florence Johnson is the person that actually created it.

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Ned: Good job, Florence. We knew you could do it.

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Chris: That ends steroids. What? In 2013, Fang stood for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. Then, as now, these companies have an outsize impact on our lives. They are all absurdly profitable, and they all show little to no interest in protecting customer data or customer privacy or actually really even having good products. Yes. Now, It's no longer 2013. The name Fang isn't really valid anymore. First of all, a couple of these companies have renamed themselves in ways that we do not acknowledge.

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Ned: Oh, absolutely not. Facebook forever.

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Chris: And there are a There are a few companies that fit the mold of what I want to talk about today that aren't represented in that grouping. Microsoft is a major omission. They're a big company. You might have heard of them.

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Ned: It may come from time to time.

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Chris: Twitter should probably also be an honorable mention for reasons that will become clear as we go through this. There have been attempts over the years to change Fang into a more, I don't know, modern acronym. Mama and Manga being humorous, at least, and pronounceable. But I think at this point, we're just going to go ahead and stick with Fang. And instead of it describing companies specifically, We're going to just use it as a category or an umbrella term. A company qualifies for Fang because they do XYZ or they are of size XYZ, right?

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Ned: Right.

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Chris: I think it's important to think about in that way. I mean, really, what we're talking about is vampire capitalism. So we stick with the pointy teeth metaphor. The company is being intent on sucking every customer dry. Yes. You get it? You're following? You're keeping up with me?

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Ned: Yeah. And then grinding up their husk to get every last bit of data or value out of it.

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Chris: Right. And in these companies' cases, those two things are, generally speaking, equivalent. So long story short, too late, what I want to talk about today is going through these different companies, the products that they offer, and talking about alternatives. Because they are all putting themselves in a position where they're the only game in town, and that is factually unfactual.

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Ned: Carried the two. Yes, I agree.

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Chris: It's correct I'm really incorrect. I could go on. Or could I?

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Ned: Would you?

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Chris: Without any further ado, as if such a thing was possible, let's start with our good friend Facebook. Ned, I know you love Facebook.

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Ned: So much. I want to kiss it right on its ugly face.

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Chris: Is that because you're a masochist?

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Ned: I mean, that is a distinct possibility. But Facebook is the absolute worst.

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Chris: They are the worst, and they are an inspiration for pretty much every list like this that exists on the internet. And believe me, there are many. Facebook is the proud and uncontroversial poster child for abusing users and selling their data over and over and over and over. We don't actually have time to go through their cavalcade of sins, but we can summarize.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: And this is actually going to be applicable to all the fan companies that we're talking about. These are the things that we're trying to avoid. Number one, aggressive and non-opt-outable data collection. Every single tool that Facebook owns tracks you and everything you do all the time. Even if you're not a customer, even if you don't have a Facebook account, you have a shadow Facebook account. We all remember the dreaded and famous Facebook Pixel.

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Ned: Does everybody remember this? You might have to explain this Because I don't think that everyone is familiar with what Facebook was doing with the pixel.

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Chris: So long story short, if you had a Facebook account and you left Facebook open, Facebook would scan your browser and your cookies and all that stuff to see all the different websites you went to. But there was a big problem. If you didn't have a Facebook account, what could one do?

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Ned: How dare you?

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Chris: What they did was through different services and things that other websites would have out, a single pixel was included that would give a tracking ping every time you went to it, you as the end user going to website X. Based on you as the end user and the things that your browser gives away as a fingerprint, Facebook would create a virtual account for you. They would figure out who you are as a unique person on the internet and follow you around and then use you as a pseudo Facebook user for advertising purposes. And I'm not really sure why I'm putting this all in the past tense.

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Ned: As you say, you're pretending like they aren't doing this right now.

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Chris: The thing about The reason for the Facebook Pixel was that it was a dead simple technology, and it was pretty easy to block once you knew what it was. But what's important is the theory behind it. Because to your point, they're 100% still doing this in different and probably way worse ways. Yes. The fun thing about it is Facebook, for the service that they provide, they refuse you as a user to pay for their service and opt out of the data collection part.

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Ned: Yep, that is a choice in their business model. We don't want your money because we make a lot more money off of your data.

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Chris: And it's not even It's the potential for even more money down the line.

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Ned: Good point.

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Chris: In the European Union, they have lost some of these fights, and there is an option where you can pay for a subscription to Facebook. You can pay them a monthly fee, which allegedly opts you out of all of this data collection stuff. Admittedly, the jury is still out on the effectiveness of this. But in the good old US of A, we've got no choice. And the next thing that Facebook does that is a nightmare is algorithmic amplification and manipulation. The data that comes to you as a user through Facebook is not chosen by you. You might think that it is, and that's very cute. The reality is it is chosen by Facebook, and it is chosen specifically to keep you interacting with the platform. They have been shown repeatedly to have no interest in what is true, what is valuable, what is helpful to you. All they care about is you keeping clicking on things in their website. If you keep clicking, they're going to keep amplifying. Let's not forget the multitude of times that Instagram has been accused and proven to be taking advantage of the emotional Challenges or state of miners.

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Ned: Yeah. A miner who's in a vulnerable emotional state, which they can figure out based off of... One example was a miner decides to delete a selfie that they put up a few moments ago. That would be taken as a cue by Instagram and Facebook that they may be in a vulnerable state and not like the picture they took. And so they would be immediately served with ads for makeup and weight loss and other self-enhancing products, trying to take advantage of the fact that the person took the picture down.

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Chris: And we're putting self-enhancing in quotation marks on this one, just to be clear.

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Ned: Yeah, this is all absolute garbage products, but they're being pushed as if they will make you look better than you do and you can improve yourself, whatever. Yeah, pretty awful and disgusting stuff. And it has been proved multiple times that Facebook was directly offering this service to advertisers, saying, We can pinpoint these emotional states and these situations and make sure that your ads here at this time for miners.

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Chris: Right. So that's pretty horrific.

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Ned: A little bit.

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Chris: And this is what we're talking about with the fang companies and the alternatives that I'm going to be talking about for the rest of this episode is we're not saying that the Facebook product itself isn't valuable in some way. It probably is, the connectivity and all that stuff. It wouldn't be popular if it didn't have some value. But the consequences and the things that you're actually paying for without putting dollars on the table, there are other ways to go about this.

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Ned: Absolutely.

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Chris: So, major first step. Instead of the main Facebook service, you could use Nothing. Seriously, that's probably the best case scenario. Social media, probably a mistake.

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Ned: Almost certainly.

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Chris: If that's not going to work, there are other things out there, and it's tough to go into them all without it becoming its own episode. The first thing I would say is Discord is pretty cool. And the reason that Discord is cool is that you subscribe to a Discord for whatever small scale subject matter that you are interested in. For example, I am a member of the Discord for the Philadelphia Philies. Do you know what I don't hear about in the Philadelphia Philies Discord?

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Ned: Ads for beauty products?

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Chris: That's the first one. Yeah. I'm actually a member of probably 15 or 20 different Discords, and they're all exactly like that. They're specific to whatever that is. The people in them talk about only that thing. I'm not expecting somebody to throw a complete left field curve ball at me. I'm not sure that that's how that expression works.

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Ned: I'm not going to start- You should ask about it on your Philly's Discord.

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Chris: Right. Oh, wait, I get it. That's a baseball joke. The narrowness of the conversation is what's important here. It's not talking about everything with everyone all the time. It's talking about this one thing. And if I wanted, say, for example, to talk about politics, I could sign up for a Discord that is specifically about talking about politics.

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Ned: Sounds like hell, but I'm sure somebody wants to do that.

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Chris: Well, that's the magic of this, and that's why I think it's really important is you can pick and choose, because I, for one, am not interested in that conversation. I don't want to have that fight. I don't care who's wrong or right. I just don't want to fight no more.

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Ned: Oh, how sweet.

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Chris: But if you want to, you can.

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Ned: I think a valid point or counterpoint to that is there's a general community and connectivity aspect to Facebook, and it's where my network is today. Now, not me because I've stopped using Facebook for over a year now. But my wife is still on Facebook. Her family is still on Facebook. That's how they see pictures and get updates and those kinds of things. It would be hard to convince them to all join a Discord server. Right.

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Chris: And that's the problem that we're going to come up with over and over again, especially when it has to do with a lot of people being required, is the network effect. Everybody uses Facebook because everybody uses Facebook.

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Ned: If you want to replace Facebook, you have to replace it with something that is equally simple to start using and equally cheap to start using.

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Chris: Right. Well, yeah. And I think the word and is important there because the other option in this area was something like Mastodon, which is cheap but not easy. No. It's not as functionally click and go as Facebook is. But anyway, let's move on to some of the other products that Facebook has, and they have many. The next one is WhatsApp. Whatsapp is an offline, not phone-based way of communicating with people. Instead of WhatsApp, you could use Signal. Signal has gotten a lot of free press from people who apparently really, really don't want their messages recorded or read by anyone in the future for some strange reason. Again, this is not a politics podcast, so we'll just let that lie.

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Ned: Yes, indeed.

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Chris: There is also Telegram, which I've heard good things about, but that has its own controversies. We can skip that for now.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: The next big one is Instagram. And this is tough. I looked around and Flicker is in fact still a thing. Holy shit. Really? I know.

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Ned: I learned something new.

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Chris: There are other photo sharing social media type sites out there, though. And if you remember, and you're old, you remember. Although you're old, you might not remember.

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Ned: Yeah, we'll see.

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Chris: Instagram used to be pretty straightforward. You We have a timeline-based feed. People put up pictures, other people comment on those pictures. We all move on with our lives.

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Ned: If you say so.

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Chris: Then it got bought by Facebook and everything became a nightmare.

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Ned: That's what Facebook does to everything it buys.

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Chris: There is a product that I honestly don't know a ton about, but has gotten a lot of good press called PixelFed. It's one of those federated services.

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Ned: Okay. Like Mastodon.

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Chris: Well, yeah, It's based on, is it Activity Pub?

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Ned: Activity Pub? Yeah.

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Chris: It's the platform or the protocol. I don't even know how to describe what it is. But the point is, you can run your own individual server wherever you want. You don't have to have it be tied to a corporate oligarch like a Facebook or an Instagram. And the point of PixelFed is to try to get back to that original goal of just very simple, here's a cute picture, here's a couple of hashtags, and that's the end of the There's no advertising, there's no data scraping, all that crap. If you don't like what's going on with the server, you can move off to someone else. This is obviously one that I have not actually used, although I will admit that I downloaded it.

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Ned: That's a start.

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Chris: So there's that. The reports out there are that the owner of the site has been approached by venture capital and has thus far declined. That's a good sign. I mean, obviously, that's a good sign for now, but it's important to note that this type of thing exists.

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Ned: Okay. I have to admit something, and that is I never got on the Instagram train at all. It completely passed me by. I signed up for an account. I signed up for an account, Chris, and I was immediately overwhelmed with the amount of bullshit on there. I was like, No, this is just not for me. That was it.

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Chris: No, good for you.

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Ned: So I just... I don't understand the attraction, but I guess a lot of people do because it is hugely popular.

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Chris: How's your elbow, by the way? From patting yourself on the back so hard?

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Ned: Oh, yes. Well, it does feel a little sprained. I might have to ice it later.

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Chris: Let's move on. Fair. Let's move on to to Apple, although I'm going to put Apple and Microsoft together in this category. These are tough to park out. To park out?

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Ned: Yeah, we're going to park them outside.

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Chris: On the outside. These two are tough to parse out, but I still want to bulk them together because they are primarily known for one thing, their desktop environment.

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Ned: Oh, I thought you were going to say phones.

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Chris: Osx and Windows, respectively.

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Ned: What was I thought you were going to say phones, and then I remembered Windows phone, and I just laughed to myself for a bit.

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Chris: I still remember Mike running around the office going, The Windows phone is underrated.

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Ned: Yes, he believed that right up until the day that they canceled it.

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Chris: Windows has been turning more and more into a vulture-like data thief over time, where they will be forcing you to share every single ounce of data with Microsoft at every In fact, the latest updates for Windows 11 installer require you to have an online account to even run the desktop operating system.

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Ned: Oh, that sucks.

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Chris: It sucks. Now, before we shit on them too much, Apple does something similar and has for a while. It is possible to run OSX without an Apple ID, but it is also borderline pointless. How exactly do you think you'll be downloading anything from the app store, I might ask? And where's all the software?

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Ned: It might be on the app store.

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Chris: On the app store?

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: You banana. Now, I do believe that Apple is better about data protection than Microsoft, but I also don't want to give them too much credit. Apple still scrapes all of your data and pays attention to all of your activity. It's just that they only do it to force their own advertising on you.

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Ned: True.

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Chris: Is that better? Lest we forget, Apple continues to get dinged for violating privacy, losing data, and eavesdropping on you via Siri. Oh, crap. I said the name out loud. The latest settlement that Apple went through, they have applicable users getting a whole $20 for privacy violations.

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Ned: Big money.

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Chris: I know. So that's the big difference. Your privacy is worth $0 to Microsoft, hardy, hard, hard, but it's worth a whole sawbuck or two to Apple. Wow. Anyway, for Operating systems, realistically, your only option is Linux. I know. I know. Think about it, though. Linux is wholly self-contained. There's no cloud services required. You don't have to have an account anywhere except for on your desktop, and you have access to an entire universe of software, except for all that other software.

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Ned: There is that, yes.

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Chris: Linux is still a challenge. It takes some getting used to. It takes some manual effort, and some stuff is just flat out not going to work. That's a problem, because when you have a user environment that you're used to, Things on that environment just work.

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Ned: Right. So do they? As someone who's been using Windows for however many years, I don't want to talk about it. I could say that the platform doesn't always just work. Sometimes it just doesn't work, and then I get called in. So I know Linux is an alternative, and another alternative that is good if you have people in your life that don't need anything more than a browser is a Chromebook. I know it's still Google and you need an account to sign into it. There is a way to do it with a local user if you absolutely want to. But that thing is so dead simple. It's literally just a browser. I bought two Chromebooks for my in-laws about 10 years ago, and it was the best decision I ever made because I have not had to render any tech support in the last decade for that.

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Chris: That's a fair point, and we'll get back to them when we talk to Google, because, again, with a lot of this stuff, there are pros and there are cons. But let's leave the operating system aside and talk about some of the other things. What else does Apple and Microsoft do? So Apple has iMessage, which is unambiguously better than SMS or whatever swivel Android is pretending that is it's important and makes its users tolerate. Rds, I think they call it. No.

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Ned: Well, they call it Messages. But what it's actually using on the back-end is, I want to say RTC, but I don't think that's right.

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Chris: I know the R is correct.

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Ned: Yeah, I'll remember it at some point. But yeah, and Apple has adopted it to a certain degree. So now when you have conversations with Apple iMessage users, you get the typing dots and everything.

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Chris: And really, that's all you need.

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Ned: That's all I ever wanted.

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Chris: Also, if you want to use RDS, you have to have a Google account that you're signed into because Google is a jerk.

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Ned: That is correct, yes.

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Chris: So that's shitty.

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Ned: Rcs, that's what it is.

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Chris: That's what I said the whole time.

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Ned: That's what I heard.

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Chris: But again, this could easily be replaced by Signal, which we've already talked about. Then we talk about the phone itself, and this is Now, as we said, Microsoft doesn't make a phone at all anymore. Apple obviously does, makes the most popular phone on Earth, the iPhone. It could be replaced by an Android device. Downside there is, most of that ties to a major manufacturer like Samsung or an Android that is created and shared with you by Google. We didn't talk about Google, but we already know what Google does. In terms of the actual hardware, there's a company called Oneplus, which makes independent third-party hardware that you can install a vanilla Android on. There's also the company called Nothing, which does the same thing but is the most annoying name for a company ever.

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Ned: I'm surprised you even mentioned them.

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Chris: I'm doing it out of protest. Okay. Both of them have a rep for having hardware that is slightly inferior to whatever you could get from Samsung, but also they're both viable. It works. It's a phone with a touch screen. Honestly, that part is commoditized. It's the operating system that matters. If you run that with an Android that is completely vanilla, then you don't have to do the Google Play Store and all that stuff. You've solved that problem. Switching over, Apple makes its own computers. That is, in fact, the only way to run OSX without jumping through a lot of hoops. And Microsoft actually makes their own hardware, although their surface stuff still sucks.

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Ned: I have the surface laptop, and I like it. It's hot garbage.

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Chris: It smells like poop.

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Ned: All right. Agree to disagree.

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Chris: It should be better.

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Ned: It's adequate.

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Chris: There are third-party manufacturers of hardware out there that are interesting and worth looking into. There's a company called Framework that I literally just about because of researching this article. And there's also System76. System76 sells prebuilt machines that run the privacy-focused POP OS, which is a Ubuntu that has a lot of canonical's bullshit tracking and package management stuff ripped out.

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Ned: Nice.

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Chris: So that's a lot of fun. I like POP OS a lot. I've never used their hardware, the System76 hardware, but it's on the right path. And I think we did a whole thing about this Back in the day about System 76?

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Ned: We did something along those lines, yes.

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Chris: But it's funny because even these days, Linux distributors are getting into the game of collecting data for unknown reasons and having bloatware in their software. Fun.

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Ned: That's how you know you've made it as an operating system when you can start abusing your users. I do have a framework as well because I was curious about it, and it's a decent piece of hardware. It doesn't feel as polished as a product that would come from Microsoft surface or a Dell or something like that, but it does have the distinct advantage that every part is serviceable.

[00:31:50.04]
Chris: It's a lot of replaceable stuff.

[00:31:52.16]
Ned: Yes. You can upgrade components of the laptop without replacing the entire laptop. If at some point I want a faster processor, I would have to replace a portion. I would have to replace probably the system board, depending on the processor, but every other component, the network interfaces, the charger, the screen, keyboard, all that would stay the same. I would just disassemble it, put in the different system board, and reassemble it. That's nice.

[00:32:21.03]
Chris: That is super cool. For certain people, the last generation or two of OSX hardware has been a line in the sand because what they started to do is bake the the RAM directly onto the motherboard. Meaning if you buy it at 16 gigs of RAM, that's it. You can never upgrade that. You can never replace it with faster RAM. And some people have a problem with that.

[00:32:47.27]
Ned: Understandably so. Okay, who's up next?

[00:32:51.17]
Chris: Next up is Amazon. And this could have been its own episode. Okay. This behemoth covers a lot of services, many of which have no relation to one another, and there's actually no reason they should all be owned by the same corporate entity. Although, remember back when Henry Ford famously said, It's just good capitalism for a bookstore to own a grocery store. Oh, wait, no, wait. Hold on. He didn't say that because that's stupid. That's the thing Henry Ford II would have said because he's dumb.

[00:33:34.22]
Ned: I will take your word for it.

[00:33:35.28]
Chris: Is the joke. Got it.

[00:33:37.15]
Ned: Okay.

[00:33:38.28]
Chris: Anyway, the biggest thing that ties consumers to Amazon is Amazon Prime. Yes. This is one of those subscriptions that I guarantee a lot of people don't even remember that they're paying for from year to year because you've been paying for it for so long. Yes. And what are the benefits that you get from it? Free two-day shipping for products What is it? It's all free day. No, it's all free two-day shipping no matter what the cost, right?

[00:34:05.11]
Ned: More or less, yeah.

[00:34:07.13]
Chris: Plus, you get movies and TV from the Amazon Prime Service where they still show you ads for some fucking reason.

[00:34:13.00]
Ned: They didn't use to. That was a relatively easy reason.

[00:34:16.24]
Chris: And, of course, Amazon has that home automation helper, whose name I'm scared to say out loud because who knows what she's going to do. The biggest hurdle to get away from Amazon is the convenience. And this is serious. Back in the good old days, if we can, in fact, call them that, what would happen is you would go online, you would see a thing on a website, you would buy it, you would give this individual website you'd never heard of before, all of your information, and just roll the dice that your credit card swipe was legit and that that item would get to you eventually.

[00:34:57.28]
Ned: It's frankly wild. It's frankly wild. Yeah.

[00:34:59.20]
Chris: It is so much easier these days because you don't have to care about 126 different websites having all your information when you can just give it to one, Amazon. Order everything from there. And this is tough. This is hard to argue with because 10mhexrench. Com, while having an extremely valuable product, It's way easier for me to just go to Amazon and go click, click, and have it show up two days later.

[00:35:38.19]
Ned: Entirely too easy. The convenience is the killer.

[00:35:42.16]
Chris: The problem with this is all of the things that these companies do that ruin the whole world. But I mean, CDs are 11 cents cheaper.

[00:35:52.21]
Ned: What's a CD?

[00:35:55.10]
Chris: Cd's nuts.

[00:35:57.05]
Ned: That was too late. Okay.

[00:36:00.21]
Chris: So the first part of getting rid of Amazon is the easiest, and that is just buy less shit. The worst part about convenience is the convenience. Because you can just go on Amazon and be like, actually, you know what? You know what? I do need a juicer. I haven't had a dehydrated banana in a long time.

[00:36:27.05]
Ned: I mean, Dehydrated bananas are pretty tasty.

[00:36:32.16]
Chris: This is how it happens, Ned.

[00:36:34.12]
Ned: Damn it. Somehow my phone is already on Amazon and I'm halfway through ordering a food dehydrator, and I didn't even touch the phone.

[00:36:45.05]
Chris: But in terms of the core properties, Amazon used to be a bookstore, and they make a lot of hay still selling books and book-based electronic devices. So there are some alternatives. There is a great website called Book Bookshop. Com. I'm emphasizing that on purpose. It is Bookshop, not Bookstore. Com. Bookstore. Com takes you to a horrendous, scammy, nightmare, hellscape that will steal your identification. Don't do that.

[00:37:16.05]
Ned: No.

[00:37:17.14]
Chris: Bookshop connects you so you can buy things online through that website, or they will direct you to a local bookstore. If you haven't been to a local bookstore in a while, you should do that. They're fun. They smell like books and people who know things, which means a faint sense of B-O, but like a good one, like a polite one.

[00:37:37.22]
Ned: It's comforting.

[00:37:39.04]
Chris: One that knows a lot of contractions. In terms of the actual device, ebooks are super popular, right? And the default is Amazon Kindle. I think that's probably realistic or fair to say.

[00:37:53.03]
Ned: Yeah.

[00:37:53.29]
Chris: How many Kindles do you have?

[00:37:56.17]
Ned: In the house right now? See, you don't even know. Well, we have the Kindle tablets that were for the kids because they were super cheap, but none of them use those anymore because they're terrible, because they're super cheap.

[00:38:08.29]
Chris: Because they can't do anything except for read books.

[00:38:11.16]
Ned: So legitimately actually being used. I have my Kindle paper white right here, and then my wife has a Kindle. Right. That's it.

[00:38:21.08]
Chris: So people might not know, but you actually do have options. There are other devices that exist out in the world that can do the exact same thing. There's the Nook from Barnes & Noble, although that isn't really solving the problem because that's just a product from another giant company.

[00:38:38.22]
Ned: I think it was also discontinued.

[00:38:41.10]
Chris: Is that right?

[00:38:43.02]
Ned: It might be.

[00:38:45.26]
Chris: Well, there's a reason I wasn't going to recommend them anyway.

[00:38:48.15]
Ned: Fair enough.

[00:38:49.13]
Chris: There is an independent eBook provider. There's one called Books, B-O-O-X, which makes a number of different products that are Android-driven and awesome in terms of ebooks. There's also Qobuz. Qobuz is the whole deal. They will sell you the reader, but they will also sell you ebooks through their own built-in platform and all that stuff. A lot of times, they're actually cheaper than the ebooks on Amazon. So that's fun, too.

[00:39:16.01]
Ned: Yeah. One of the challenges I've run into is if you have a non-Kindle device that can... Or if you have a device that can run cloud library or something similar, Libby, you can read ebooks from your library on your device, but the Kindle, Paperwhite, and other similar devices won't run that app because they can't. And so you can't easily borrow books from your library on the device. There are workarounds. I'm not going to tell you where to find them, but you're smart. You can, well, don't Google it, but use some other search products.

[00:39:53.07]
Chris: And that's where a books comes in or a Qobuz because you have the ability to just flat out, you can install the Kindle application. You can install the Libby application, and then you can do whatever you want with the device that you paid for. Crazy idea, I know, but it's still possible in this day and age.

[00:40:11.11]
Ned: That's fucking wild. Well, we managed to get through a few of the companies, but Chris, it seems like you have a lot of feelings about other companies. And maybe I can get on the bandwagon, too, and type out my feelings on one or two as well. So this is going to end up being a two-parter, everybody, because It turns out that all the technology companies are awful, and we knew that going in. As a preview, Chris, what two things are you going to cover next week?

[00:40:45.24]
Chris: If we start going into the Google thing, it becomes a problem. There are a lot of fun options about search engines, I think, that people are going to be really interested in.

[00:40:55.22]
Ned: Interesting. Okay.

[00:40:57.11]
Chris: Then the other one that people actually use from a professional basis that we need to spend some time on, cloud services. There are alternatives to AWS, GCP, and Azure.

[00:41:11.18]
Ned: There certainly are. I have some things that I probably want to add to that as well. So we'll end on that, and that may be a much more expanded section by the end of next week.

[00:41:21.23]
Chris: The last thing I would say is if people have products in this vein that they're interested in or have used and have good experiences with, we'd love to hear about it.

[00:41:31.11]
Ned: Yes, please reach out to us. You can find us on LinkedIn or go to chaoslever. Com and fill out the feedback form. In the meantime, hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough. If you made it all the way to the end of part one. So congratulations to you, friend. You're halfway there. Maybe living on a prayer. I don't know, but you accomplished something today. Now you can go sit on a couch, fire up your Amazon Kindle, and go ahead and order that food dehydrated creator that you want so badly. You've earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page or go to chaosleaver. Com, where you'll find show notes, blog posts, a feedback form, and general Tom Fouhry. We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us Ha-ta for now.

[00:42:25.20]
Chris: Maybe next week I'll tell the story of how I accidentally almost set the house on fire with a food dehydrator.

[00:42:33.19]
Ned: I almost set my garage on fire, but that's because I was burning tissues on a trash can.

[00:42:40.16]
Chris: Pyromania. That's part for the course.

[00:42:44.00]
Ned: It's their second best album.